Outer City

Dirty and uncouth, the Outer City holds everything the elite of Baldur’s Gate resist allowing within their walls: the poor, refugees, tanneries and stockyards, and other industries that offend highborn sensibilities. Stretching forth from each of the city’s external gates, the Outer City sprawls in a chaotic tangle of shanties and shops, carts and tents lining the roads in hopes of bleeding off enough city trade for their owners to survive. And indeed, much of the commerce in Baldur’s Gate happens in these unregulated markets, with even patriars shopping from inside perfumed litters.
While smaller neighborhoods such as Tumbledown and Blackgate squat outside their respective gates, the majority of the Outer City runs along the Coast Way as it curves around the foot of Duskhawk Hill, between Wyrm’s Crossing and the city proper. Residents of these neighborhoods are not technically citizens and receive no representation in the Government, nor do they receive the benefit of the city’s police forces. The Flaming Fist rarely patrols the Outer City, usually emerging only to pursue Outer City residents for crimes committed within the walls.
The Outer City’s challenges lead to small, tightly knit communities, where a person’s honor and social connections are the only things standing between them and a quick death.

Approaching the City

Visitors approaching Baldur’s Gate by road first pass through the Outer City’s ramshackle neighborhoods, their traffic hemmed in by cook fires, market stalls, and industries too noisy or repugnant for more genteel citizens. Here travelers must leave any sizable mounts or beasts of burden at one of countless stables and caravansaries before paying the fees to pass through the gates into the city proper. Travelers from the south are twice blessed in this regard, paying once for the bridge at Wyrm’s Crossing and again once they’ve run the gauntlet of Outer City neighborhoods circling Duskhawk Hill.
Travelers arriving via the river wait in the center of Gray Harbor, under the watchful eye of the Seatower, until one of the harbormaster’s agents approaches in a fast-moving skiff. Protected by coteries of Gray Wavers (Flaming Fist veterans), these customs officials assess the boat’s cargo, collect taxes, and sell hourly berth assignments at one of the city’s many docks and piers. Large vessels may also pay to make use of the city’s marvelous mechanical cranes, dramatically accelerating their unloading process.

Neighborhoods

The following neighborhoods make up the Outer City.
Blackgate. The Outer City settlement beyond the Black Dragon Gate, Blackgate serves those traveling to and from Waterdeep on the Trade Way. Huge stables cater to travelers’ mounts, while a community of shield dwarf ironsmiths draws even residents of the Upper City with their skill.
Little Calimshan. This walled community’s Calishite inhabitants fiercely guard their home from the Guild and the rest of Baldur’s Gate. Little Calimshan is further detailed in "Little Calimshan".
Norchapel. The quietest of the Outer City neighborhoods, Norchapel caters to those residents willing to pay more than the usual protection money to the Guild, in exchange for having their safety and security.
Rivington. This self-contained village of anglers and river-powered mills is the first neighborhood encountered by travelers approaching from the south. Dominated by a local gang called the Rivington Rats, it’s also a haven for smuggling thanks to its river access.
Sow’s Foot. Here, expatriates from dozens of far-flung nations mingle with races ranging from lizardfolk to svirfneblin among the scents of succulent cooked foods and the calls of strange animals, banding together against a city that views them as outsiders.
Stonyeyes. Just outside the Basilisk Gate that gives it its name, this neighborhood is full of stables and stockyards. Many Outer City residents who work within the city live here to be as close as possible to their places of business. Among them is a significant community of half-orcs.
Tumbledown. Off by itself overlooking the river, this perpetually foggy neighborhood hosts the Cliffside Cemetery.
Twin Songs. Standing ready to welcome visitors as they cross the river, Twin Songs is renowned for its enormous diversity of shrines and places of worship, from tiny roadside altars and idols to home-based temples. While those in search of significant magic must still generally visit the larger temples in the city proper, no god is too foreign or obscure to be worshiped in Twin Songs’ divine sprawl, where even non-criminal worship of fiends and the Dead Three goes unchallenged.
Whitkeep. This neighborhood takes its name from the white manor house at its center, which houses the city’s largest enclave of gnomes. Free-spirited and home to hordes of artists, the neighborhood would likely attract trendy city folk and price out the resident radicals, if not for its odoriferous tanneries.
Wyrm’s Crossing. This massive bridge crosses the Chionthar River. Shops and homes gird the bridge’s edges.

Outer City Locations

Balduran Looks Out to Sea

Shortly after Balduran disappeared for the final time, this statue appeared on the cliffs of Tumbledown. Twice the size of the actual man, the statue bears an uncanny likeness to Balduran, squinting west over city and river. While its sudden arrival created something of a stir, most assumed it was simply a tribute to the great man — until one morning several months later when passersby noticed that one of the statue’s hands had risen to shade its eyes. Scholars immediately began studying the statue, learning that at sunrise on the first day of each new year, the statue flickers, changing its position in an eyeblink. Though it always looks west, the precise line of its gaze can change by up to thirty degrees, and it may peer through a spyglass, stand with hands on hips, point with an open hand, and so on.
For centuries, the predominant theory was that Balduran still lived somewhere far to the west, and the statue tracked his movements. Yet a generation ago, a knight of Oghma vowed to follow the line of the statue’s gaze as far as necessary to learn the truth. His journey was shorter than expected. In a wood just a few miles west of the city, he came upon a cylindrical stone building, its open doorway revealing stairs leading down into the forest floor. Atop the building, a smaller statue of Balduran stared back the way he had come. Prevented from entering by a pattern of magical lights he couldn’t identify, the knight raced back to the city to gather additional scholars — yet when he returned, the structure was gone. Since then, the forested structure — which popular stories now refer to as Balduran’s Tomb — has been discovered three more times in the same fashion, each time in a different location, yet so far no one has been able to enter.

Cliffside Cemetery

The value of land and sheer population density in Baldur’s Gate means only the wealthiest patriars can afford to bury their dead within the city, interring them in catacombs beneath the city’s temples or in family crypts on their own grounds. For everyone else, there’s the ignoble Shrine of the Suffering or the scattering of cemeteries outside the city. The largest of the latter is Cliffside Cemetery, located in the Tumbledown neighborhood and employing many local residents as gravediggers, stonemasons, morticians, and professional mourners.
Long ago, the graveyard was an empty estate owned by the mercantile Szarr family, with only a few family crypts near the cliffs. When a business rival murdered the entire family in their beds, no one was eager to move into their former manor, and the city decided to turn the estate into a single massive graveyard that acts as the primary repository for the city’s dead.
The graveyard itself is a maze of crypts and monuments, its organization nearly impossible for outsiders to discern as the multi-chamber ossuaries of rich merchants and pirate lords loom over the simple plaques and rotting wooden holy symbols of the poor. Natural cavern systems have been expanded and shored up to create extensive crypts, yet over generations maps have been lost or poorly updated, and it’s not uncommon for a gravedigger to find themselves striking the wood of a coffin where no coffin should be, or tumbling through into a forgotten stretch of tunnel. Rampant grave robbery by brigands and necromancy-obsessed followers of Myrkul only increases the chaos, as bodies get exhumed and reburied wherever it’s convenient. Most significantly, a major landslide decades ago dropped a large portion of the cemetery’s cliff into the river below, causing the remaining bone-houses and markers to shift and lean, while also exposing numerous crypts and tomb-tunnels to the air, prompting a fresh rush of grave robbing. Though Baldurians rarely bury their dead with valuables anymore, and many of the easier pickings have been taken, it’s common wisdom that some of the greatest treasures of past centuries still lie entombed with their heroes, their headstones wiped anonymously clean by wind and rain.
Watching over all of this is the powerful Gravemakers crew. Far more than simply caretakers and laborers, the Gravemakers guard the dead — and Tumbledown — from threats. With so much death concentrated in one spot, undead are a constant problem. Skeletons and revenants regularly claw spontaneously out of their graves, while ghouls and ghasts burrow into crypts and catacombs, drawn by the scent of decaying flesh. Wights hide in their tombs by day, while ghosts and wraiths terrorize unsuspecting mortals. Putting down such threats before they can prey on citizens is the Gravemakers’ primary job, and though rightfully proud of their prowess, their leader Leone Wen, a lawful good female human knight and servant of Torm, is always looking for fresh recruits or contractors to join them in their crusade. The crew operates out of the half-burned old Szarr Mansion in the cemetery’s center, its moldering halls reputedly still infested by the ghosts of the murdered Szarrs — though stories remain split as to whether the ghosts prey on the Gravemakers or aid them in their duty.

Church of Last Hope

This combined chapel and asylum in the Twin Songs neighborhood has long offered sanctuary for the depressed and mentally ill. The few attendants ascribe to the faith of no particular god, but extol the virtues of meditation and whatever calm faiths visitors might bring with them.
Few seek the church’s services on their own. Rather, most who come to dwell at the church either have a room rented for them by concerned family or receive a somewhat mysterious — and usually unexpected — invitation from the institute’s superintendent, Mother Aramina, a lawful good female human priest. Aramina is a former Candlekeep scholar who’s moved her lifelong study of psychology from the academic to the clinical. How Mother Aramina learns of individuals’ distress and under what circumstances she offers free room and board in her facility is something of a mystery, but as of yet, none have discovered any sinister angle to her work. In fact, Mother Aramina has been known to hire empathic intermediaries to help extricate the needful from destructive conditions. Despite its charity, though, the Church of Last Hope is not universally loved. The Faithless, the Guild-associated gang in Twin Songs, see a trove of wealthy city-dwellers and wishy-washy non-priests in their midst, ripe targets for protection schemes, kidnappings, and all manner of other plots. Currently none of the Church’s patients have been endangered, but Mother Aramina is cautiously looking for more permanent security solutions.

Danthelon’s Dancing Axe

This two-story shop sells everything an adventurer might need, from weapons and armor to rowboats and mobile monster cages. Presiding over the crammed shelves is Entharl Danthelon, a neutral good male shield dwarf commoner who claims to have been an adventurer once himself, as evidenced by the magical flying axe that guards his shop at night. Customers are inevitably treated to the story of the grateful elven princess who enchanted the axe for him as a reward for a daring adventure undertaken on her behalf.
In truth, Danthelon’s “dancing axe” is actually a tame stirge wrapped in the illusion of a double-bladed axe, which Danthelon sets loose each night. The illusion is courtesy of Yssra Brackrel, a neutral female half-elf mage and brilliant hairstylist who rents out the shop’s attic. Yssra’s cantankerousness is as legendary as the shop’s flying axe, and anyone seeking just her spellcasting is subject to a frank and unflattering critique of their current coiffure.
While Danthelon may never have been a real adventurer, he loves associating with them, and constantly keeps his ears open for rumors and opportunities, which he happily passes along to paying customers. At the moment, he’s obsessed with reports of a group of smugglers who recently went missing in the Riverveins tunnels along with a chest full of valuable magic potions, and eagerly encourages his shoppers to investigate — and then return to tell him the story.

Garynmor Stables and Menagerie

As horses and other beasts of burden aren’t allowed inside the city walls, the Outer City overflows with stables and hostlers, ranging from muddy pens to barns nicer than most inns. Of these, the largest is Garynmor Stables, which offers the unique benefit of operating locations in both Stonyeyes and Blackgate; those travelers passing through have the option of leaving their beasts on one side of the city and picking them up on the other, after grooms have ferried them around the outside of the walls. The stables are also unusual in their willingness to rent mounts to city residents in need of transportation, cutting down on the need of city dwellers to own their own horses. Yet the true gem setting Garynmor Stables apart is its menagerie.
A former world traveler, Ubis Garynmor (chaotic good male human commoner) has long had a fascination with exotic beasts, and having already developed the infrastructure to take care of large numbers of ordinary animals, he found it easy enough to expand the scope of his establishment. His menagerie in Stonyeyes contains a variety of rare creatures both mundane and magical, from an aged cockatrice and two wing-clipped hippogriffs to an owlbear. Always on the lookout for new attractions, he happily pays adventurers for healthy specimens of rare creatures, sometimes reselling the smaller and less dangerous species. While the menagerie is popular with city folk who pay a few coppers to view the creatures, many neighbors fear that Ubis doesn’t take security seriously enough, and that his desire to coddle such dangerous beasts could lead to them breaking free and rampaging through the district.

Hamhocks Slaughterhouse

This huge complex of pens, barns, and abattoirs is the largest slaughterhouse and knackery in Baldur’s Gate. Located in the Stonyeyes neighborhood so as to be convenient to the city’s butchers, the facility has a generally adversarial relationship with neighboring establishments, as other herders and hostlers claim the omnipresent smell of blood makes their animals nervous. Yet it’s the citizens themselves who should be nervous, for the slaughterhouse recently came under new management.
Seeking to spread fear and chaos, cultists of the Dead Three have infiltrated the slaughterhouse and begun murdering people across the city, leaving the victims in an alley behind the Smilin’ Boar in Bloomridge. To further fan the flames, the cult slices the corpses across the wrists and inflicts a heart-piercing wound, giving rise to rumors that the murders are the result of a supernaturally deadly serial killer.
Pasque Enrial, a black gauntlet of Bane, is the cult’s mastermind. He engineered the death of the slaughterhouse’s former owner so that he could take over, figuring that constant blood, offal, and animal screams would provide a suitable cover for the cult’s murderous activities. Since then, he’s been slowly laying off existing workers and replacing them with cultists loyal to the group’s mission. Assisting him are Corian Khee, a death’s head of Bhaal who spends days crushing livestock skulls with a massive hammer and nights leading the cult’s murderous field operations, and Jaemus Exheltarion, a half-elf master of souls. Of the three, Jaemus is the least convincing in his role as the slaughterhouse’s new accountant, as he greets customers with an eerie stare, openly reads strange-looking tomes, and spends entirely too much time in the cult’s trophy locker, a cold-storage facility where he’s using pieces harvested from victims and livestock to construct a ram-headed flesh golem.

Little Calimshan

Generations ago, a fleet of Calishite refugees fleeing war in the south came sailing into Gray Harbor. Rather than opening their doors to the foreigners, the people of Baldur’s Gate quickly hustled them out of the city, forcing them out the Basilisk Gate in the middle of the night and taxing them for the privilege. Desperate and weary, the refugees finally found succor in a caravansary run by a fellow Calishite in the Outer City. There they used what little wealth they’d been able to bring with them to construct a new home — a traditional Calishite settlement that would be precisely as friendly to Baldur’s Gate as the Baldurians had been to them.
Though much time has passed since that ignominious beginning, tensions remain high between Little Calimshan and the rest of the city, particularly with regard to those Baldurians living in the city proper. Unlike most of the Outer City, where neighborhoods blend into each other and no one can quite say where one ends and another begins, Little Calimshan is sharply defined by brick-and-plaster walls, 15 feet tall, 5 feet thick, and topped with minarets in the classic Calishite style. These walls don’t simply surround the neighborhood, either. Little Calimshan is built like a traditional Calishite city in miniature, with its interior divided into multiple drudachs (neighborhoods). Each drudach is walled off and inhabited by a particular extended family or clan, with its own religious site, inn or tavern, marketplace, and places of industry such as smithies, armories, tanneries, or mills. While such an abundance of walls might make Little Calimshan seem fractious and standoffish, in fact the opposite is true: the thick wall walks act as elevated streets, with locals able to look out over the layout from above and easily pick a path to their intended destination.
Second only to the Wide in the chaos and liveliness of its markets, Little Calimshan opens its gates to outsiders for just a few hours each day. Inside its warren of bazaars, local merchants have a near-monopoly on many southern imports, from silks and fine blades of Calishite steel to tomes of rare magical lore, thanks to exclusive trade agreements with various caravans. As soon as mid-afternoon arrives, however, shoppers are shuffled back out the arched gates, and the only non-Calishites still allowed within the neighborhood are those who’ve married into a Little Calimshan family or otherwise earned the sacred trust of a drudach’s residents. While many residents of Little Calimshan venture into the larger city for business or pleasure, not even the Flaming Fist is able to force its way into the neighborhood-turned-fortress after hours except in the direst circumstances, and each drudach is instead patrolled by a militia of young unmarried warriors (guards with scimitars instead of spears) called amlakkars.
While Little Calimshan presents a unified face to the rest of the city, it has all the problems of any settlement. Income inequality is made all the more obvious by density, with paupers living literally side-by-side with wealthy genie-binders. Older isolationists clash with young folk eager for more interaction with the wider city. Yet by far the largest issue is the gang war currently ravaging Little Calimshan. Seeing the Guild as fundamentally an outsider organization, a Calishite gang called the Right Pashas seeks to oust Guild agents from Little Calimshan’s underworld. The Guild’s popular kingpin, Rilsa Rael, naturally objects to this insult, and each night residents bar their doors tight as a turf war of thugs and thieves rages across their rooftops.
Among Little Calimshan’s most notorious locations is the Calim Jewel Emporium, widely regarded as the best jeweler in the city — and the best place to fence stolen gems, as it’s also the local Guild headquarters. In addition to hosting regular public forums in her shop, Rael tacitly oversees the Garden of Whispers, a maze of wood-and-paper screens where people from across the city can buy and sell secrets with Guild agents and each other, speaking through the barriers so as to maintain anonymity. Also popular are schools like the Lamp of Learning and the Verdashir Academy, which train spellcasters and warriors in the styles of their ancestral homeland, allowing only the most talented outsiders to access their archives or join in their lessons. And, of course, every patriar in the city has visited the famous Oasis Theater, home of the city’s most daring — and sometimes dangerous — productions.

Oasis Theater

Baldur’s Gate plays home to a variety of small theaters and cabarets, but none can hold a candle to the epic spectacle of the Oasis. Theater owner and director Jonas Goodnight, a chaotic neutral male human spy, puts on shows even more outrageous than his magnificently crafted outfits. Productions involve everything from live monsters to powerful illusion magic, while also showcasing the most talented performers in the city. Actors and musicians perform their songs and monologues from atop flaming trapezes or human towers, while acrobats shock the audience with physical feats bordering on the supernatural.
Even lowbrow theatergoers unable to decipher Goodnight’s artistic genius can appreciate his flagrant breaking of taboos, with risqué burlesque and satirical scripts mocking everyone from the dukes to Nine-Fingers Keene herself. The fact that these performances sometimes go terribly awry, with monsters breaking loose or a broken piece of equipment sending a performer plummeting into the crowd, only adds to the excitement, and patriars and common folk alike vie for seats at the theater’s afternoon-only performances. Ticket prices are decided capriciously and on the spot by Goodnight, varying wildly between any given individual.
While Goodnight is always looking for new performers, at the moment he needs more than just a talented bard or contortionist. The cost of putting on his outrageous shows has landed him deep in debt, and his compulsive need to roast every potential patron or ally in the city hasn’t helped matters. With the Guild ready to step in and assume ownership if he doesn’t start repaying his loans, he needs to either turn to outright crime or put on a show more amazing than anything he’s done before. He’s got an idea, but to pull it off, he’ll need an experienced adventuring party willing to play the stars in the world’s first live-audience adventure.

Riverveins

Just east of the city, where Dusthawk Hill rises along the Chionthar River, eddies captured by outcroppings have bored into the stone, carving a maze of meandering tunnels and draining into subterranean aquifers. Though hardly diverting enough water to impact the river’s flow, the web of submerged chambers has become a source of mystery and legend for locals.
While most of the tunnels are submerged, changes in river height over time mean that some of the tunnels and caverns are dry or only half-flooded for long stretches, making them favored hideouts for fugitives, smugglers, aquatic predators, and particularly adventurous trysting lovers. Though rumors whisper that some tunnels lead directly under Baldur’s Gate, to date all mapped caverns are accessible only from the river, and even just climbing into a tunnel mouth or steering a boat inside can be deadly as the current attempts to smash vessels against the cliffs. Stories of ancient treasure in the flooded caverns are only enhanced by stories of Ol’ Cholms, a river monster, prowling the tunnels. Many would-be fortune hunters have been disappointed to discover dry tunnels containing nothing more than crude graffiti, empty wine bottles, and flocks of bloodthirsty stirges.

Whitkeep Hostel

In a city often thought to be dour and dangerous, the Whitkeep Hostel is a spark of light and levity. Built by a wealthy caravan operator who lost their fortune to monster attacks, this white-walled manor house was quickly overtaken by squatters, and has now spent most of a century as an all-gnome artist’s commune. Though only gnomes are invited to rent one of the rambling manor’s thirty-seven studio apartments, Baldurians of all races are welcome to socialize at the place’s infamous surrealist parties or attend its concerts and offbeat art happenings. As such, the hostel has become the central gathering point for the city’s radicals and revolutionaries, as well as many artists and dreamers.
One of the neighborhood’s more outspoken critics of the Gate’s Government, Pernilla “Prole” Cabrenock, a chaotic neutral female rock gnome bandit captain, has teamed up with an oddball inventor and arcanist named Ardryn Deagle, a chaotic good male rock gnome mage. Rumors spread by Prole herself suggest that they’ve almost completed a magical invention that will “finally strip away the bonds of capital and free the people to flourish,” but security around the project has been unusually tight, keeping even many members of the commune in the dark. While most people assume this is merely some strange new critique of the city’s patriars, both the Guild and the Flaming Fist would dearly love to infiltrate the revolutionaries’ project and make sure it doesn’t pose a threat to the status quo.

Wyrm’s Crossing

This neighborhood is actually two enormous bridges, each spanning half the Chionthar River and meeting at Wyrm’s Rock, a tall, rocky islet in the center. While the Flaming Fist maintains a fortress on the island to tax travelers along the Coast Way and control city access in times of trouble, the bridges themselves are fair game for squatters. Ramshackle wooden tenements, taverns, and shops crowd both sides of the arched stone spans, leaning out over the narrow road between them. Even more cling to the sides of the bridges, anchored to each other or cantilevered over the water. The tendency of these latter structures to occasionally drop into the rushing river, pulling their neighbors down with them, is not enough to deter residents who hope to be the first to sell to travelers on their way into the city, or the last to pick their pockets on the way out.
Even among members of the Outer City, residents of Wyrm’s Crossing have a reputation as rakes and riffraff, and the neighborhood specializes in seedy dive bars and gambling halls where belligerent drunks can be ejected directly out over the river. At the same time, it also has a large and tight-knit strongheart halfling community, whose low-ceilinged tenements and lighter weight are perfect for the neighborhood’s precarious architectural style.
While the Crossing is renowned for cheats and criminals, the residents stick together, and a local crew called the Crossers ensures that all predatory practices are applied primarily to travelers, and never to fellow bridge-dwellers. For those who consistently refuse to play well with their neighbors, the answer is often Sweetjen’s Spices, a precarious bridge-side shop whose halfling proprietor quietly sells some of the most potent drugs and untraceable poisons in the city.

Wyrm’s Rock

This formidable fortress rises from the center of the river on an algae-slick islet, its sheer walls nearly impossible to scale. Built by the Flaming Fist on a rock once said to have housed a bronze dragon, the fortress is the first checkpoint at which Baldur’s Gate taxes northbound travelers. Anyone seeking to cross the river via the fortress’s two massive bridges must pay the 5 cp toll and pass through the fortress via a long central tunnel riddled with arrow slits and murder holes. Between twenty-five and fifty Flaming Fist soldiers staff the checkpoint, which operates only during the day. After dark, the drawbridges on either side of the keep are raised, halting all traffic and forcing latecomers to take shelter at one of the many bridge-top inns in Wyrm’s Crossing until morning.
The fortress has four levels: the bridge level, taken up by the gauntlet tunnel and offices devoted to traffic management; a second-story armory full of oil, javelins, and everything the soldiers need to withstand a siege; a third story for soldier’s quarters; and a high-ceilinged dungeon level below the bridges to hold temporary prisoners and the fortress’s supply of small boats (should the garrison need to sally through heavily fortified river-level gates). Soldiers stationed in the fortress tend to fall into two categories: those disappointed at being stuck on toll-collection duty so far from the city, and those overjoyed at easy work and a chance to carouse in Wyrm’s Crossing, with the latter ensuring that the Fist doesn’t patrol their neighboring bridges too heavily.
The commander of Wyrm’s Rock, Skorpin Crane, died in his sleep recently. Foul play was ruled out, and Grand Duke Ulder Ravengard was in the midst of finding Crane’s replacement when he was lured away on a diplomatic mission to Elturel. Until a replacement is found, the Mage Defender of Wyrm’s Rock, a neutral evil shield dwarf mage named Gardak Horn, has taken command. The guards loathe Gardak because he uses a homunculus to spy on them.